The second omnibus collection of the old Dark Horse Buffy series is strictly mediocre. In fact, I'd rate about half the stories at 2 or 2.5 stars. TheThe second omnibus collection of the old Dark Horse Buffy series is strictly mediocre. In fact, I'd rate about half the stories at 2 or 2.5 stars. They're just filler to continue the Buffy franchise. Even in the introduction, the editor admits that DH didn't pay much attention to continuity or have consistent quality (which is true of both the writing and the art).

However, the first story arc - a tale of Buffy and Dawn and their mother moving to Sunnydale following their parents' divorce, and being plagued by Malignancy Demons, was well done and emotional at times, even with the canonically questionable decision to include Dawn. (As viewers of the TV series know, Dawn didn't appear until Season 4, but due to the reality-altering nature of magic in the show, she "retroactively" existed in Buffy and everyone else's memories as having always been there.)

There were also a couple of Spike/Dru stories, including one written by James Marsters (the actor who played Spike). These were decent enough to make the collection worth reading. However, there's nothing really exciting here even for Buffy fans, and I'm not really inclined to read the rest of the series, whereas I will be following the continuing series written by Joss Whedon that is an extension of the show....more

The Buffy Omnibus collects the old Dark Horse Comics series that preceded Buffy: Season Eight. These stories were not written by Joss Whedon or with WThe Buffy Omnibus collects the old Dark Horse Comics series that preceded Buffy: Season Eight. These stories were not written by Joss Whedon or with Whedon's input, which shows as there isn't the characteristic clever dialog or planting of plot seeds that emerge later.

Omnibus Volume 1 tells Buffy's "origin" story, which means the first part is a graphic adaptation of the original movie, and the rest is the events between the end of the movie (when Buffy burned down her old high school) and the beginning of Season One of the TV show, when she arrived in Sunnydale.

Many of the events were referred to in the TV series, so it can be considered "canon" in the same way the Season Eight comics series is. Here is the story of when Buffy ran away to Vegas with her boyfriend, Pike, returned home to parents fighting and on the verge of divorce, and then spent some time being institutionalized after they (i.e., Dawn) found her diary. Naturally, Buffy being the Slayer, everywhere she goes turns out to be a den of vampires or demons, and she can't leave before bringing down the place in flames.

The inclusion of Dawn is problematic, given that she didn't even appear until Season Four of the TV show. But the nature of her origin means she "existed" retroactively, so the writers decided to include her in the storyline. And she gets a story of her own about a misdelivered teddy bear (which, of course, turn out to be another demonic plot).

It's a pretty good collection, assuming you are a Buffy fan. If you're not, then you'll probably find it nothing special. The artwork is good though not exceptional. I do wish they'd get all the artists on the same page about whether Buffy's eyes are green or blue, though....more

This is a collection of short stories all set in Joss Whedon's Buffyverse, and so just as "canonical" as the "Season Eight" comic series from Dark HorThis is a collection of short stories all set in Joss Whedon's Buffyverse, and so just as "canonical" as the "Season Eight" comic series from Dark Horse Comics, but mostly they are independent shorts focusing on Slayers throughout the ages, and a few little vignettes about secondary characters. The volume opens with a few pages showing the First Slayer, then skips through various periods of history, each Slayer Tale written and illustrated by a different team.

Righteous is about a Slayer in medieval Europe who saves a town from a master vampire, but finds that the town is less than grateful. Echoing frequent themes in Whedon's work (fear of female empowerment), it's one of many of the stories that has a rather dark ending.

The Innocent features the Slayer hunting vampires on the streets of Revolutionary France, and being betrayed by very human evils.

Presumption is an Austenesque romp with a vampire and a Slayer dancing at a Regency ball, with a twist ending.

The Glittering World takes place in the Old West, with a Navajo Slayer hunting a Navajo vampire. As a bonus, we get a first glimpse of Sunnydale and an old friend from the TV series.

Sonnenblume is one of the more disturbing and yet more heroic stories, as the Slayer this time is a German girl in Nuremberg in 1938... and a member of the Hitler Youth.

Nikki Goes Down stars Nikki, the 70s Slayer who appeared in the TV series, in a pulp adventure romp where she rides a pteranodon into the NYC subway (seriously!).

Tales is set in Whedon's future-Slayer Fray universe.

Broken Bottle of Djinn stars another WWII-era Slayer, this time an American (presumably the replacement for Sonnenblume) saving the world from a Big Bad Djinn.

The second half of the volume collects the Tales of the Vampires series, which made individual vampires characters. Of course they are all evil, but sometimes you can almost sympathize with them. These stories also range throughout history, though with more focusing on the modern day, and a few of them involve characters from the series: Spike and Drusilla make an appearance, as does Angel, and there's a humorous tale with Buffy going to rescue Xander from Dracula. This is where the book ties into the events of Season Eight more, as there is frequent mention of Harmony Kendall's "outing" of vampires and making them cool and popular while turning Slayers into public enemies. Some vampires are happy about the new rules, some aren't.

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much -- more than I enjoyed a lot of Season Eight. You can tell some really interesting stories about new characters who happen to exist in the Buffyverse in just a few pages, and the occasional filling in of events referenced but not described in the series lets the writers go off on tangents they couldn't in the main storyline. Since this is a collection of several series going back over ten years, there's a wide range in writing and drawing styles.

Definitely recommended for Buffy fans, even those who didn't like Season Eight or would prefer not to think of it as canon....more

The conclusion of "Buffy Season Eight" is a bit of a mess, plotwise, but it does more or less wrap up all the threads spun during the issues leading uThe conclusion of "Buffy Season Eight" is a bit of a mess, plotwise, but it does more or less wrap up all the threads spun during the issues leading up to the finale. Buffy and friends return to Sunnydale to face a bunch of old friends and foes and deal with the threat to the entire universe. Buffy has to make a hard decision, and there are Consequences. Also, some major character deaths.

I think the chaotic nature of this denouement was inevitable because of all the balls Joss Whedon and his writers tossed into the air. So you've got demon invasions, ultra-cosmic MacGuffins, umpteen iterations of "He's on our side! No, he's not!" and a resolution that seemed familiar in a lot of ways.

Despite all the high-concept ideas and SFX, it actually seemed like they're getting back to the Buffy basics, and Joss Whedon's letter at the end addressing the fact that he knows there were some missteps along the way in Season Eight confirms that. There will be a Season Nine, and it seems that they will focus a little bit more on Buffy running around staking vampires and a little bit less about Buffy turning into Supergirl and throwing submarines around and leading superpowered armies against extra-dimensional invaders.

If they'd just reverted back to Square One I'd have been pretty annoyed, but one thing the Buffy series has always had going for it is a sense of continuity and the knowledge that problems and issues don't just disappear between seasons (usually). So I expect the repercussions of Season Eight will follow the gang into the next season, even if the scope and theme shrinks back to something more like what the old TV series was.

Overall, I would say that Buffy Season Eight was fun and enjoyable with a few bad "episodes," not always entirely successful, and if compared to the TV seasons, neither the best nor the worst of the lot.

For old Buffy fans, it's not quite like having the show back on the air, but it's close enough....more

The next-to-the-last volume of "Buffy: Season 8" was better than the preceding one, with the return of many familiar faces, including (as the cover reThe next-to-the-last volume of "Buffy: Season 8" was better than the preceding one, with the return of many familiar faces, including (as the cover reveals), Buffy's old flame, Angel, as well as the revelation of who the Season 8 Big Bad, "Twilight," really is. (And Buffy finally gets in a "Twilight" joke -- I was waiting for that all this time.)

Here, once again the writers are going for great big earth-shaking plots that the TV show's special effects budget would never have permitted, and it seems they are also trying to outdo the game-changing end of Season 7, when the world was left full of Slayers. In this volume, Buffy becomes even more powerful than she ever was before, and we learn that this is not necessarily a good thing. Also, Giles once again has a deep dark Watcher secret about the possible end of the world.

What made this volume good was the jokes. There was lots of Buffyesque humor and one-liners. Andrew and Warren "teaming up" with their mad scientist Iron Man & Captain America gadgets was particularly entertaining. The dialog between Xander and Buffy was also good.

What made it not so good: I found the plot a little confusing, Twilight's "Master Plan" stupid, and the whole "The universe itself has engineered this outcome; Mother Nature cannot be thwarted even by vampires and Slayers" was just a lot of gimme-a-break. Also, multi-page sex scenes are no less cringe-inducing in graphic novel format (with panels full of strategically-placed shadows and tree branches) than they are in fantasy/sci-fi novels, so just give us one panel to let us know they had awesome, earthshaking sex and leave it at that. This was fan service taken to absurd extremes, and it took itself too seriously to even enjoy the cheese/beefcake....more

Finally catching up to "Buffy, Season Eight." They had a ball in this one doing stuff the TV show's special effects budget wouldn't have allowed, likeFinally catching up to "Buffy, Season Eight." They had a ball in this one doing stuff the TV show's special effects budget wouldn't have allowed, like Giant Dawn vs. Mecha-Dawn. That was the funniest part of the battle in Tokyo against a gang of shapechanging Japanese vampires. Also, the banter between Xander and Dracula was cute.

Otherwise, this is what I would have called an "average" episode if it were airing on TV: good but not outstanding, though it did move the plot arc forward a bit. Overall, I thought the bad guys' plan was defeated a bit too swiftly considering the scale of it (take away the powers of all the Slayers in the world!), and the self-conscious satirizing of every Japanese fanboy trope they could stuff into the "Buffy goes to Tokyo" episode got a little wearing. Good that the Japanese vampires acted like modern smart-asses and weren't all "Let's pretend we're ninja or samurai or some other medieval bullshit," bad that they acted like Western smart-asses with pretty much the same sense of style and humor. (Seriously, why would they build a Mecha-Dawn just to fight a giant teenager?)

The adherence to Whedon's style and use of "Buffyisms" sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but for the most part I liked the dialog and the banter. And they did what they also might not have been able to get away with on TV: Buffy decides to "experiment" with another girl. So, this could have totally read as titillating lesbian action for the male reader (especially since it's the hot Japanese Slayer she sleeps with) and I'm sure a lot of readers read it that way, but humorous bits aside, it's actually dealt with in a fairly realistic way, which is to say, it ends messily and uncertainly since, as Buffy admits before they start, she's really not gay. I'm not sure if this would please or further incense all the Buffy fans who were furious when Whedon killed off Tara.

Speaking of killing people off, everyone knows the Whedon Law of Happy Relationships, right? You'd think by now everyone on the Buffy crew would know that two people falling happily in love is a guaranteed death sentence for at least one of them....more

Amazingly enough, I remember reading this right when the movie came out. The Disney movie was kind of crappy; the book was okay, but wasn't able to imAmazingly enough, I remember reading this right when the movie came out. The Disney movie was kind of crappy; the book was okay, but wasn't able to improve much on the source material....more